by Nancy Farmer
“Now? It was raining buckets when Fidelito and I went into the tunnel.” Listen gave a sigh and settled into Matt’s arms.
“It’ll be fun,” he assured her. “We’ll get wet and the horse will get wet. It’s like swimming in the air.”
This interested the little girl, who had learned to swim in the huge Alacrán pool. Sor Artemesia taught her and watched while she and Fidelito, who’d been taught by his grandmother, splashed around.
“Watch this,” said Matt. He clapped three times and said, “Waitress, wake up!” Mirasol shot to attention, ready for orders.
Listen crowed with delight. “It’s magic! I mean, ‘cultural history.’ Can I watch her dance?”
“Not today,” Matt said. “I don’t know how good it is for her to do it too often. And Listen”—she turned toward him—“let’s keep Mirasol’s dancing our secret.”
“Okeydokey,” she agreed. “Only, I get to see her next time.”
“Okeydokey,” said Matt.
34
THE GREENHOUSES
They left Mirasol in the kitchen with Celia and walked to the stable. The rain swept down, with periods of calm between the storm cells. Matt taught the little girl how to measure how far away a lightning bolt was. “When you see a flash, count one-thousand-and-one, one-thousand-and-two, and so on until you hear the thunder. Every five counts means it’s a mile away,” he said. As an afterthought he added, “If it’s closer than half a mile, we’ll go back to the stable.” He didn’t plan to take her far.
Listen squealed when the rain hit her, but once she got used to it she jumped around in a frenzy of glee. She splashed through puddles and squelched through mud. It was the happiest Matt had ever seen her.
An eejit brought them a Real Horse at the stable. “It’s awfully big,” Listen said.
“I felt like that the first time I got on a horse,” Matt said. “It is big, but you can hold on to me. I won’t go fast.” They climbed onto a mounting block to make it easier for her, and Matt swung her onto the saddle behind him. As before, he noticed how light she was.
They went out into the rain, and the horse snorted with annoyance. Matt kept the animal at a walk. They circled the stable and then, since the storm had temporarily ceased, went farther to where he could see the cluster of workshops. All the workers were inside.
“Let’s go on,” Listen urged. “I like swimming in the air.”
Matt could hear the rattle of looms from the cloth-making factory. A kiln puffed smoke from an enclosure near the pottery shed. The English garden around the guitar factory was a wreck. The roses had been stripped by the storm, and a foot-long chuckwalla was munching petunias, oblivious to the rain.
Matt hadn’t intended this visit. It followed naturally from taking Listen for a ride. Matt had noticed that when he was cruel to someone, he often followed it with more cruel things. You got into that mood. But if you were kind, you felt like doing more kind things. He’d started with Mirasol, gone on with Listen, and now it seemed reasonable to finish up with Chacho.
He tethered the horse under a ramada, and he and Listen slopped through the mud to the guitar factory. Child eejits were singing in one of the rooms, not German folk songs this time, but a Christmas carol. El Patrón had liked carols, although, to be honest, the old man hadn’t cared about the holiday except as a chance to get more presents.
Children, go where I send thee
How shall I send thee?
I will send thee one by one
One for the little bitty baby
Born, born, born in Bethlehem.
“That’s nice,” said Listen. “What baby are they talking about?”
“Jesus,” said Matt, racking his brain for information about Jesus. He hadn’t paid much attention to religion because, until recently, he hadn’t had a soul.
“Oh. You mean Jesús Malverde.”
“No, not him. Someone much earlier. He was born on Christmas Day. Didn’t you celebrate Christmas in Paradise?”
“Dr. Rivas says that religious holidays are crap,” declared the little girl.
Matt experienced a new dislike for the man. “We’ll celebrate it this year, and Sor Artemesia can tell you about the Three Kings who bring gifts to good children. Consider it ‘cultural history.’ ” They watched the choir and their elderly music master. The voices were high and sweet like the sandhill cranes over the oasis.
“Their eyes . . .,” Listen said.
“They’re eejits,” said Matt, and pulled her on before she could think about it. Outside, the rain began again. Lightning flashed, and he saw the little girl silently count, One-thousand-and-one, one-thousand-and-two. Chacho and Mr. Ortega were sitting by a window, drinking maté. Eusebio was stringing a guitar, pausing to listen as he tightened the tension. One end of the room was filled with guitars. It’s like the opium factory, thought Matt. It’s a machine you can’t turn off.
“Matt,” said Chacho, putting down his cup. “Or should I say mi patrón?”
“He’s come halfway, bug brain. You can do the rest,” said Listen.
Mr. Ortega laughed. “I told you, if anyone can nag the dickens out of someone, it’s Listen. Welcome, mi patrón or Matt or whatever you want to be today. We’ve been enjoying the storm, although I miss hearing thunder. I can feel it through the earth.”
Matt sat across from Chacho. They didn’t speak. It was awkward after all this time, but Mr. Ortega expanded on his appreciation of the monsoon, and Listen wandered over to watch Eusebio. She was very much at ease in this place.
Matt thought his friend looked thinner and more haunted, and no wonder. It had to be tough watching Eusebio day after day. “Maybe you can come to the hacienda for a visit,” said Matt. “I’d like that.”
“Excellent idea!” said Mr. Ortega. “I’ll get the umbrellas.”
“Father . . .” Chacho looked toward Eusebio.
“Will be better for the break,” the piano teacher said. “Por Dios, he must be sick of looking at your long face all the time, Chacho. I know I am.” He hurried the boy into a raincoat and pushed him out the door. Matt collected Listen and went back for the horse. The eejit children were singing:
Children, go where I send thee
How shall I send thee?
I will send thee seven by seven
Seven for the seven that never got to heaven.
They found Ton-Ton taking apart a music box on Celia’s kitchen table. “He says he knows how to put it back together. I sure hope so,” said Fidelito. The box was one that fascinated him, because it showed a pirate and a sea captain crossing swords to a song called “High Barbary.” No one knew where High Barbary was, but Fidelito liked to dance to the music, slashing a stick around as though he were fighting pirates.
“If you break it, I’ll beat the stuffing out of you,” he told Ton-Ton.
“Y-you can try,” said the big boy. “Don’t look so, uh, worried, chico. I took apart all the others and th-they’re fine.”
“You didn’t touch ‘You Are My Sunshine,’ ” said Fidelito.
“That’s too difficult,” Ton-Ton said. The cowboy, the man in black, and the lady sat among a number of boxes at the far end of the table.
“Chacho!” cried the little boy as he and Mr. Ortega came in. “Look at this music box. It’s padrísimo!” He reached for “Sunshine,” but Celia blocked his way.
“I have to cook here. This isn’t a playground,” she scolded. Mirasol followed, carrying a stack of mixing bowls.
“Please, please let us stay. This is the best place in the house.” Fidelito hung on to her apron and smiled winningly.
Celia smiled back in spite of herself, but her rules were inflexible. “How can I prepare food with grubby hands all over the place?” Ton-Ton carefully put the bits he was working on into a bag. Matt and Chacho moved the other music boxes. They went to a nearby room and found a table that had once belonged to a maharaja. It was made of dark wood inlaid with ivory. Ton-Ton covered it with a sheet so as
not to damage the surface.
“I haven’t seen this room before,” said Chacho.
“You haven’t seen a lot of the rooms here,” Listen said. “The hacienda is huge. Fidelito and I found—” She was stopped by a frown from Matt. “You wouldn’t like what we found, Chacho. It was full of big, horrible spiders.”
“I saw one,” Fidelito said. “It wanted to bite me.”
“Ha! That was a baby,” scoffed Listen. “The ones I saw could eat a rat for breakfast.” The little boy looked alarmed. Matt had to admire her quick mind. She’d not only stopped Fidelito from talking about the secret passage, she had hit upon the one thing to keep him out of it. She was used to keeping secrets.
Chacho had seen the “Sunshine” music box before, but he willingly watched when Fidelito wound it up. “Tell me, Ton-Ton,” he said. “Why are you taking these apart?”
“I’m trying to, uh, figure out how the microchips work. In a machine, you wind it up and it starts moving. One part m-moves the next part and so on. The parts have to be touching.” The boy laid out the bits to the pirate box in his slow, methodical way. “The m-microchips in the brain don’t touch each other and they don’t, uh, have to be wound up. But they’re still a kind of machine. Something connects them. This is my way of thinking about the p-problem.” He waved his hand at the boxes. “Sooner or later I’ll figure it out.”
No one argued with this. They were used to Ton-Ton’s dogged way of working. It wasn’t interesting to watch, however, so Matt suggested they take Chacho on an excursion to the greenhouses. The storm clouds had mostly dispersed when they got outside, and fleeting patches of sun lit up sand verbenas and primroses.
“Look!” shouted Fidelito, dragging Chacho past mango trees, papayas, and granadilla vines in the first greenhouse. “It’s like the Garden of Eden.”
“The Garden of what?” asked Listen.
“The place where our great-great-great-grandfather and great-great-great-grandmother came from. Mi abuelita told me about it. God used to walk around in it and eat mangoes.”
“Dr. Rivas says God doesn’t exist,” the little girl said.
“Dr. Rivas is a horse’s butt. Sor Artemesia says He does,” retorted Fidelito. “Let’s look at the other greenhouses.”
As Matt had expected, Chacho was overwhelmed by the flower gardens. He was struck speechless by the orchids and their strange shapes and unlikely colors. He stood in front of them for a long time, tracing their outlines in the air. He really is an artist, Matt thought. “You can come here whenever you like,” he said.
“I’d like to bring my father,” Chacho replied.
Matt’s heart sank. Eusebio was unable to appreciate anything, but Matt didn’t want to discourage his friend. “Of course. Ask Mr. Ortega to help you.”
When they had gone through the last greenhouse, Matt noticed another building in the distance. Its walls were of some sort of plastic or glass, and he couldn’t remember seeing it before. The sun came out and the walls changed from transparent to milky.
All of them shaded their eyes and looked. The building was perhaps half a mile away, and Matt suggested that they go there. But Listen was unwilling to walk farther, and Fidelito backed her up. Chacho wanted to get back to Ton-Ton. So Matt went on by himself through ragtag bullhead vines and grass awakened by the recent rain. The walls of the building changed color several times as clouds passed overhead.
Close up, he saw that even when the walls were dimmed he could see inside. Vague shapes moved among tables, and long pipes snaked under a ceiling. A constant chuffing spoke of some kind of machinery. Matt opened the door to a small entryway, and an eejit handed him a gauze mask.
Now he understood what this was. Cienfuegos had been busy—very busy—to go by the size and complexity of the place. Beyond the second door was a forest of mushrooms, some growing in boxes of soil, others sprouting from logs or beds of wood chips. The walls dripped with condensation, and the air was thick with the odor of rotting wood. The Mushroom Master and Cienfuegos were inspecting a giant log covered with parasols of cream-colored fungi.
The Mushroom Master had been persuaded to exchange his white tunic for trousers and a shirt. He was wearing moccasins, having no doubt discovered the folly of walking barefoot over bullhead thorns.
“Caught in the act,” the jefe said cheerfully, looking up. “I was going to tell you when we were further along. Isn’t this wonderful, mi patrón? It only cost us a ton or so of opium.”
Matt was almost speechless. A ton of opium? Millions of dollars? It cost “us” that much money? There is no “us” involved here. Cienfuegos isn’t the Lord of Opium. “How dare you go behind my back,” he finally managed to say.
“I didn’t go behind your back,” Cienfuegos said quickly. “You wanted to clean the soil around the eejit pens, and this is how we’re going to do it. The Mushroom Master inspected them last month and told me which fungi to use. He has methods for getting the mycelia to sprout quickly.”
“The what?” Matt asked weakly.
“Mycelia,” the Mushroom Master said. “It’s like roots, only for mushrooms.” Both of the men looked immensely pleased with themselves. They reminded Matt of Listen and Fidelito after the children had pulled off some glorious prank.
“You can’t take people out of the biosphere.” Matt pointed at the white-haired man who was thoughtfully nibbling one of the cream-colored fungi. “¡Por Dios! It was kept isolated for eighty years, and now you act like it’s your private playground.”
The two men looked at each other. “I made the suggestion to leave,” said the Mushroom Master. “I’m one of the few scientists left in the biosphere and almost the only person who knows that a world exists outside. It was decided long ago that we had to adjust to being imprisoned in a small world. We created our own civilization.”
“The Brat Enclosure, the Dormancy period,” said Matt.
“Yes. We give our immatures a happy, loving childhood so that they grow up contented with their lives. Then, when the time comes, they are put into a kind of sleep where their brains are receptive to learning. They become cooks or weavers, beeherds or frogherds, and they emerge as adults. A few of us learn the old-fashioned way, because Dormants aren’t creative. We few cope with emergencies and keep the system going.”
Matt put his hand down on a table and recoiled when he felt something slimy. “You program children like robots.”
“It isn’t that heartless,” said the Mushroom Master. “How could children be happy, knowing they were prisoners? It was better for them to believe that the world ended at the wall. By the time the armed guards outside went away, generations had passed and our new civilization was established.”
Cienfuegos plucked a cream-colored fungus from the log. “This is an oyster mushroom, mi patrón. They’re very tasty except when they’ve been feeding on pesticides. I like to fry them in olive oil, but raw ones have that spicy background flavor.” He held one out temptingly. Matt took it, but was too distracted to eat it.
“People out here need me,” said the Mushroom Master. “Of what use is the biosphere if we allow the rest of the world to die?”
Of course he was right. Matt had to agree with him. But it made him uneasy that you could program children into being whatever you liked. It wasn’t that far from being microchipped.
“Don’t people notice when you leave the biosphere?” the boy asked.
“They assume I’m in another building,” said the Mushroom Master. “They’re not curious.”
“They think I’m a traveler from Tundra, one of the outer ecosystems,” said the jefe. “Everyone knows Tundrans are idiots, and that excuses the stupid questions I ask.”
“Now, now. Tundrans are children of Gaia,” reproved the Mushroom Master.
“All Gaia’s children are blessed,” the two men chanted in unison, and burst into laughter.
It wasn’t possible to stay angry with them, even though Matt was annoyed at being deceived. El Patrón would h
ave murdered Cienfuegos for less. Yet wasn’t the country’s problem that no one except the old man had been allowed freedom?
It had been El Patrón’s intent to control everyone’s will. From the eejits to the doctors, all had been made part of a monstrous machine. It was a sterile machine, a parasite feeding on the surplus bodies of neighboring countries. There were no families or children. Left alone, it would die.
“I’m glad you decided to help us,” Matt conceded. “Have you tried your mushrooms out near the eejit pens?”
“Just beginning to,” said the Mushroom Master. “We’ve got plastic sheets around the pits and mycelia spreading like bullhead vines underneath. It’s marvelous!”
“Keep the prehumans away, would you, mi patrón?” the jefe said. “We don’t want Fidelito running around covered with spores.”
Matt left the men, laughing and congratulating themselves on their success. He felt deflated by the easy way they had outwitted him, yet he couldn’t argue with the results. He ran his hand over the smooth outer wall of the building. It was made of a photosensitive plastic that darkened in sunlight, ideal for raising mushrooms. It was probably worth half a ton of opium.
Deeply thoughtful, he walked back to the hacienda and encountered Listen and Fidelito in the swimming pool, with Sor Artemesia watching at the side. “What was that building?” called the little girl. “Was it another greenhouse?”
“It was a sewage treatment plant,” Matt said, and went inside.
35
THE EXPIRY DATE
Chacho did not take his father to the greenhouse. Mr. Ortega explained that removing an eejit (or “a man in your father’s condition” as he put it) from his job caused jittering. It was a sign of extreme stress and might actually kill him. This threw Chacho into an even deeper depression. He refused to leave the guitar factory and barely spoke to anyone.
